Together these sums accounted for nearly a quarter of all awards made in EEOC proceedings the previous year.

These are costs corporate America cannot continue to incur. For that reason, we turn to guest blogger, Brooke Axtell to learn why the way we talk about sexual violence prevents us from eradicating it.

The National Institute of Justice states that one out of six women in the U.S. is a victim of an attempted or completed rape. It would be more accurate to say that a significant number of American men rape (or attempt to rape) one out of every six American women.

Why does this distinction matter? It matters how we talk about rape because we cannot resolve an injustice that we cannot clearly define and understand. Men who rape do not lose control of their lust, just as men who beat their partners do not lose control of their anger. They intentionally use violence to control others.

There are men of every race, religion and socioeconomic status who choose to rape women, but in news coverage women are often blamed for the assault. The appearance and sexual history of the victim are called into question, instead of the actions of the perpetrator.

Philadelphia's Broad Street Review editor, Dan Rottenberg, suggested (and later apologized for doing so) that if journalist Laura Logan didn’t want to be gang-raped in Egypt, she shouldn’t have posed for pictures that reveal her cleavage.

In a spectacular twist of logic, English lawyer Nick Freeman claimed that women who dress provocatively “victimize men.” He surpassed the usual victim-blaming by asserting that perpetrators are actually victims of female sexuality.

Language is political.

Erasing male agency in acts of violence against women keeps us from deconstructing the messages of harmful masculinity. In mass media, masculinity is inextricably tied to violence, sexual entitlement and power over others. To heal the cultural wound of sexual assault, we have to change the way we define both power and gender. True power is not the capacity for violence, but the capacity to create social justice.